Zidane’s halo disappears in a puff of smoke

Now that the World Cup is over, we can finally resist the primal urge to link football and politics – resurgent and exuberant Germany, proud and spiteful France, corrupt and thuggish Italy, and so on – and get back to politics as usual.

Boring stuff like the EU’s incessant red-carding of Microsoft, for example.

But not quite yet. Newspapers across Europe are obsessing over the spectacular events that ended the World Cup final match between France and Italy. They hire lip-readers, psychics, psychiatrists and anyone else they can find to figure out what Italian defender Marco Materazzi may have said to provoke a head-butting from French star Zinedine Zidane. The result must be some combination of the women in Zidane’s life, their alleged connections to terror groups or the world’s oldest profession, and various unsavoury uses of an Adidas jersey.

It’s all a bit wearying and exciting at the same time. But before you decide to leave the cup behind for another four years, seek out the column written by France’s favourite celebrity ‘intellectual’, Bernard-Henri Levy, in the Wall Street Journal Europe. In it, BHL likens Zidane to a fallen Greek hero. Here are some sample quotes: “Here is a man of providence, a savior, who was sought out, like Achilles in his tent of grudge and rage, because he was believed to be the only one who could avert his countrymen’s fated decline.”

“The man’s insurrection against the saint. A refusal of the halo that had been put on his head and that he then, quite logically, pulverised with a head-butt, as though saying: I am a living being not a fetish; a man of flesh and blood and passion, not this idiotic empty hologram, this guru, this universal psychoanalyst, natural child of Abbé Pierre and Sister Emanuelle, which soccer-mania was trying to turn me into.”

And, “It was as though he were repeating, in parody, the title of one of the very great books of the last century, before the triumph of this liturgy of the body, performance and commodity: Ecce Homo, This is a Man. Yes, a man, a true man, not one of these absurd monsters or synthetic stars who are made by the money of brand names in combination with the sighs of the globalised crowd.”

BHL wasn’t the only one head-butting his keyboard this week.

In the International Herald Tribune, the usually razor-sharp Roger Cohen compares Zidane to the protagonist of Albert Camus’s The Stranger – a stretch that, while certainly literate and good for about 300 words of copy, is of such distance that French goalkeeper Fabien Barthez could have used it in Sunday’s penalty shootout.

As if things weren’t bad enough for Zidane, he’s also getting grief for being a smoker. The Irish Examiner reports on the uproar that greeted a photograph of the footballer enjoying a butt, sorry, a cigarette, during a break in training before the semi-final against Portugal. “In 2002,” the paper notes, “Zidane joined other sports stars such as Luis Figo and Damien Duff in fronting an EU-backed campaign to get people to stop smoking.”

In the words of the French TV announcer, “Oh non, pas ca, Zidane! Pas ca!”